Category: All Posts

Down in Jersey Land

Not even a million hits yet? 832,017 to be precise. Well, 832,018 now that I’ve watched it.

Personally, I see the bridge blockade as a typical Republican trick, but I don’t see Christie as the dirty trick type, so I take him at his word that his staff ran wild on this one, but of course that raises the question of why he didn’t have better control of his office. Also, for something as disruptive as the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge, you’d think he would have been getting to the bottom of it in a hurry, and if he did then why didn’t he know how it came about?

A super man at 100

Amy Adams is all the reason I need to enjoy any movie, but I didn’t watch “Man of Steel” until last night because I expected it to have the orange-and-teal color scheme that plagues recent movies with heavy CG effects, along with endless over-the-top fight scenes and a complete lack of fun. Unfortunately, “Man of Steel” met those expectations.

George Reeves was 24 years old in 1938 when Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1. A year later Reeves was in “Gone With the Wind” as one of the Tarleton twins, and it would be more than ten years after that before Reeves would find his place in pop culture history, in “The Adventures of Superman.” Reeves was born George Brewer 100 years ago today. Fans of the old show are encouraged to visit The Adventure Continues site, and the companion page on Facebook.

HTML5 Agony

For Christmas I gave the missus a Kindle Fire HDX 7″. Couldn’t resist the $179 special price. The picture and sound are amazing but, like all Android-based products, Adobe Flash isn’t supported, and this site relies on Flash plugins for audio and video. So here I’m testing an HTML5 plugin for MP3 and MP4.

I’m very fond of the Flash audio player plugin, but the old, old WordPress theme that I’ve used lo these seven years causes it to conflict with the HTML5 plugin. I tried a workaround that doesn’t work, and now I’ve switched themes to accommodate this, and I’m still hitting a problem — two in fact — so now I’m disabling the plugin and going with the HTML5 media support that’s built into WordPress, which has fixed one issue but introduced another. Aaugh! Everything was running so nicely for such a long time, that this sort of frustration was inevitable.

Video support is also rather limited compared to the Flash plugin I’ve used, which can be adjusted to fix an incorrect aspect ratio, and smooth out a picture when it isn’t run in its original resolution. Both problems are apparent here.

For a long time I have been intending to restore a lot of video clips that were taken offline when I changed web hosting services, but now I also have to contemplate converting them from FLV to MP4. What a painful undertaking!

The Music Superman

Here’s some more Adventures of Superman music. The previous example is from season 2, and this is from the first season. The music wasn’t actually written for the series, it was composed for low-budget “Poverty Row” studios in the late 40’s, re-recorded overseas to avoid the musician’s union, and later made available on transcription disks for use in TV shows. Some of it is believed to have been the work of famed film composer Miklos Rozsa. There’s a strong “Rite of Spring” component to this piece.

The first season of TAOS is a lot grittier than subsequent seasons. One of the best early episodes is “Crime Wave.” Watch Superman punch through a concrete wall, then turn around and punch bad guys in the jaw, and remember that this was a kid’s TV show.